Add BUMP to your mobile app

With the growing use of smart phones and tablets, companies and innovators around the world are working to make them intuitive, simple and fun to interact with people around.

Have you heard of Bump? Okay, we would like share this interesting and intuitive mobile app and technology behind it. Bump, allows you to exchange contact information wirelessly. Not only that, it allows you to use and leverage the technology with in your own Mobile App. Cool, is not it !!

Bump, which is an app for iPhone and Android phones, has made it very easy for people to share contacts and transfer photos or money from one phone to another. It even allows to transfer photos from a phone to a personal computer. What all it requires is a physical bump (slight hit with head to head) with an another phone which is next to it which also has bump app within it. The app simply exchanges the contact information of the phone owners immediately. The same technology that is used to share the contacts is used to share other applications such as photo sharing, money payments etc. Many saw Bump at South by Southwest 2010, Austin. It was wildfire afterwards with more than 10 million downloads with in the first year of it’s release.

How exactly BUMP Technology works ?
Technically, the way BUMP works has two parts.
(i) Identification: Detecting physical Bumps from mobile phones around the world, by collecting .
(ii) Classification: Pairing two mobile devices based on the pairing algorithms

Identification: The app first need to detect a bump. In the identification phase, the App running in your smart phone gathers information from the phone Sensors and arranges them in a specialized data structure which is then submitted to the BUMP Backend cloud. The data collected from the sensors such as accelerometer, EMF sensor etc will be useful in detecting a BUMP. Once a bump is detected, the device collect several other informations such as the geo-location, IP address, density values ( which sets the tolerances) and several other data parameters.

Classification: A smart matching algorithm running on BUMP cloud listens to the bumps from phones around the world and pairs up phones that felt the same bump. Then the Core Algorithms just route information between the two phones in each pair

With Bump one is in control of deciding with whom they share their information. Bump requires a strong connection to the Internet so that the Bump app can communicate with Bump cloud. Bump uses whatever Internet connection is available on your device, whether that is WiFi or Cellular. It requires geo-location service to be active. Bump use location information as one of the ways to limit the number of other phones, that it have to check to determine the correct match (pair). Basically, if you are in Chicago, it uses that info so it don’t have to compare your bump with bumps coming in from Japan, Europe, New York, etc. For this reason, they require that location services be turned on and that users authorize the use of their location information. If you do not authorize use of location information, Bump won’t work.

How can you leverage Bump Technology for your own App ?

At Krify, we have growing requests on utilizing this technology for our customers own apps. Bump API can be used to leverage the technology for identifying and pairing bumps. 95% of matches are displayed to the user in less than one second from time of bump. It uses secure TLS encryption which is end-to-end. It is very intuitive as the connections are established with a gesture known and loved by 85+ million Bump users. The connections are very persistent, as the connections established can persist as long as you’d like, including across sessions, with no need to hold phones together.

When you have a mobile App that requires interaction between two users, then Bump technology is something that you should worth consider. For example, check Flock – which finds the photos that you’ve taken together with friends and makes it easy for you to share them with each other.